I think the toughest part is accepting that you have to write all of it for any of it to be any good, just like you have to live all of it if you want to be alive. There is no good and bad there is only the sacred freedom to experience everything.

You have to be able – not even able, you just have to be willing, the muse / gods / universe / angels will take care of ‘able’ as long as you show up – to write the deep and the shallow, the real and the surreal, the pain and the joy, the light and the dark, infinitely. To keep moving your hand across the page is to get out past the fear, shame, and judgment that swipe at the throat of every artist all the time.

You don’t have to publish or share all of it, but you have to write all of it. Somehow. You have to find a way to do the work :: doing the work is the way.

It’s all part of the movement of the energy of creation. It’s all part of life as struggle, as play, as an act of worship, reverence, and humility. The degree to which you cut off the limbs of your feelings is the degree to which you will remain stuck. Art, spirituality, love, pain, it’s all about movement, that’s the Must.

Keep moving.

Whatever it is, open your veins wide, your mouth, ribs and eyes wide, your heart wide, and let it all move through you. The journey of the writer is the journey of the warrior. They are the same.

Butterfly wings, beloved, that’s all. Little tiny beats. The more you move your hand across the page the more you move the words that move the world.

Poetry is not dead but it’s not leather candy bodices laced with perfume either. This is what seems to be so hard for regular people to understand. That if left to our own devices, we crave the things we seek to destroy.

The way your fingers pressure the small of my back is the frothing of words I cannot find. Somewhere in the soft haze between sleeping and wake, I confuse the hum of your body in the dark with your desire to fill me, and we become a puzzle I can’t make fit. It’s the cruelest kind of poetry, the kind you mouth the words to in daydreams as you watch your own reflection splitting across train car windows but cannot force into existence.

Is it still poetry if I spell it out with paper straws in a language you didn’t study close enough? How can I help it. When love is the last word on the walls of a house that’s crumbling it sounds like renovation but out in the world no one seems to agree what it means. I’m only satisfied when the rain moves in and I wish you didn’t have to understand that when I tell my story I’m trying to give myself to you and spare you the weight of me at the same time.

The temptation is the trap; new lovers naked at the tip of a thousand knives.

You seduce strangers without losing sleep and still walk me home, chain-smoking cigarettes, talking about the way you used to make love to other women you thought would have been more tender at it. The ones you see in me when I curl up and threaten to leave. No one wants to believe that part of staying on the upswing of this pendulum life is to fall for the way it knocks the wind out of you when it slams you down. I avoid the fire the same way I walk into it, by shutting my eyelids over my feet. In the wake of the words I am the casual turning of corners, trust is a maze kept secret from me.

Words are to anguish as they are to ecstasy, a race without legs toward a freedom you’re never quite sure if you deserve. We are lions caught in butterfly nets, admiring our paws, licking our bloodstained teeth. All we want is to get close enough to abandon ourselves, to give everything away so we don’t have to eat what we’re worth.

I hand you my skin and ask with my bones if it is love. You hold tight, tell me it is warm whiskey charm, and don’t answer the rest.

In the vacancy of night, the moon washes over me a pale blue angelic light and I remember the way your beautiful jaw fits in my hands, the way the motionless bending flowers on the bookshelf mean someone’s in love in a vase, alone. When the soft creep of morning comes I’ll spend it sunk low in the hot soak of a pink salt bath, trying to be too many things. Cold cream: every face I try on feels closer to who I think I’m supposed to be, so I wear all of them at once.

I don’t need to touch you, flesh and bone too often hide the voice I would die for if you would just speak. The world is a crumbling crystal mountain range falling into midnight, the sharp plunge of a deep-sea grave, but the life we scream for at birth is infinite. There will be cold footsteps under the glow of a harvest moon, glimpses of freedom in a purple dawn, wrought iron staircases into heavy clouds as they weep, raspberry lipstick mouths and the way you prick hot wax on the beg of my pale skin.

We are the strange and magical ones who sense the coming storms by the taste of static wind on our tongues. I am alone as you turn to leave, they have told you that the only way to see me is to close your eyes. I want to reach through you to the other side, take my ribs and spread you wider than planets that orbit the sky until you become thin as the healing breath on the lonely limbs of those neglected, a shelter for the abandoned, a hand written letter inside glass bottles that contain clippings of the salt of the ocean.

All you ever asked for was a taste but I know you seek the flood, for every word you catch in your palms as it drips from the silken lips of my aching desire becomes your blood. There is no other way. This is the love of the beating hearts of every creature who ever walked the earth, man, woman, child, beast, criminal, angel, thief, opening you like a gaping cavern hollow enough to receive. Tell me how to build a room grand enough. I need not keep you, lover, to call you mine, nor hold you to sweep your amber beauty across my alien evening mind. This is a love that has outrun time.

I’m too much of a dreamer, so the story goes, but the truth is that what they call reality often turns my stomach in ways that are hard to describe. People want straight lines and I want the way pink stained glass bends images into cigarette smoke curling foreign tongues down your throat. As everyone else joins hands and I fall farther and farther away from the circle, I tuck myself inside a faith in the broken shards, the holes in the floors, all the crooked sides of my comical cosmic existence, and attempt to pour forth a drench of words that flood the earth until we all worship at the single altar of mad love instead of sadistic runaway greed.

What is the harm? What is this fear no one can seem to define, yet lives within all of us roaming freely, assembling crucifixions like clues on a board game. Is it blindness or hope that gathers us together, vulgarizes us, vilifies us, heals us, gently carries us toward a distant red sun that delivers us to the promised land of how brief we are, how inconvenient, how troubled, how beautiful.

Will they release or neglect me, these graphic phantom fantasies I press my head against in the quiet of night? Perhaps too many times already, the vacant songs of the things I’ve loved and lost could have remained my veins, my daily ritual black, but somehow I’m the dream coming true in spite of itself. Magic is a fragile flower welcoming the sweet assault of the rain. My obedience arouses you, something in your disarming movement touches me with invisible hands, holds my fickle attention. I want only for you to descend with me and escape, love is the danger of infinite folds, a sapphire ribbon of milk skin; resurrection is your hunger for my sacrificial bones.

Bodies on the pavement, serpents in the sky, and I am undone by the slightest trigger in your eyes. Grace is stillness swallowing hurricanes as an exotic universe creates and destroys itself just to please you. Your teeth against my pulsing wrist startles a flock tiny ancient birds: thin flutters thrusting violent wings in my chest, a dead world ecstatically disturbed. Your mouth on my breast is baptism, the way you collect me breaks us down by fire, fingertips for flames, the gravity between us absorbs the cries of a helpless world, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Sometimes, angel, pain is freedom and the prophets reach for heaven in reverse.

You tip my chin up to the sky, bend me just too far before letting go, I am aware my limits are merely physical. A matchstick glides backwards across the splintered catches in my mind. And as the clouds eclipse the windowless room we inhabit underground, deep beneath the time the gods play roulette with and wider than the desperate gaps between our staggered breathing, our union may be distorted but it is certain. Let the hoards of humanity speak, lifetimes of faces become one face and I’ve lost my lust for listening.

Lovers on the edge have the unfortunate habit of spilling dark secrets when their backs are naked against the wall, but I hold on to mine: silence is my only vision, a castle built upon the rugged journey of your voice as it calls me home, even after all this wasted time.

We are restless and unborn. We have been wounded by over exposure, the futile beg for love denied, maybe that’s why I clench my teeth so terribly at night that in dreams they split my gums and fall out in clumps. Such brutality, such crush, we are scattered little bugs, terrified of ugliness, we want to be beautiful and strange, want to be stroked to the dripping heat of heavy crippling pleasure and left to walk the streets alone. Daylight is the flash of a screen but I escape to the dark matter of my own haunted castle mind, my crumpled writer’s room, my wrought iron winter garden, listening in stillness for the linen voice of the ghost you hung to dry on the line. Where I can stand the thrust of the words, where limbs like curtains reach for me on the wind.

My messages caress you like candlelit passageways that open onto the tops of trees and spill my lucid thoughts out over a vacant listless sky, every star a headstone carved with the crude tools of their abbreviated lives. They call me crazy but I call it hopeful, for I believe you loved my bones before we met. Someplace inside you is where I come from and where I long to return, smooth and familiar is the way you taste like liquid metal knives and the crystal jewels of molten sex, a golden chalice erects in the healing hands of God. Love is religion like pavement glitter and nuclear dust clouds, a way to glorify the beginning of a thousand setting suns.

As I’m turning down the bed, your motionless face is rain sliding down the window of this house you occupy inside me. I wish you could trade my awful secrets for something better than I deserve, but lover, I will drink from you until the moons have turned themselves to snakes orbiting the delicate feet of angels if you would only look at me. Let them wonder about us, let them spin their every seductive bedtime story from the one we’re killing ourselves to write with our surrender. All that matters is this moment, everything else is fair disease. You and I are a single tragic blink, every second is eternity, every breath between us a fragile ritual. We have birthed each other, been raised from death into life after death.

We are fading and obedient bodies, thick volumes of handwritten history buried under lock and key, plunged in glossy wooden tombs to the bottom of the ocean. Instinctively, you know when I am wet and you dangle me there on the edge of my own pearlescent cliff, my mysterious gift, until the way I crave you becomes the quiet shatter of truth at the apex of desire. I can read the casual insanity behind your devotion as if through scars and blindness the code of your flesh will finally make sense of mine. Come and bow your head into my private madness, beloved, I am the tranquil depths you seek. Make me dangerous while everyone else is watching. We are as wild as we are high, painted figures in glass boxes wearing our scratches like diamonds, feathers, swords and star dust falling from our newborn eyes.

I sit down to write but the only thing that comes to me is everything I’d rather not say. Writing is just like anything else, the hardest part is finding a way in. Shadowy advances, wet wide eyes, shattered hearts, lovers stalking alley ways, all come in jars they hope you can’t see, but writing is tougher to open even on a good day. A drink and a half later, I’m undressing in the doorway, watching you as you absorb the fading evening light that drapes itself around my body. I wish you thought of me as a temple, intricate tunnels adorned in golden dragons with emerald eyes, ferocious winged mystical things, but delusions like these are just a way of shadowboxing with the truth. Even in this heady haze I know what we want to be and what we are is split by glass of a thick and distorted kind. You ask me to spread myself over you and my skin is hot pricks head to toe, the way you barely touch me makes the beginning taste like spiced flecks of the afterglow, just the way I like it.

Under your command I am a dove, an alien, a robbery, a beast because I have learned to stay awake even in my sleep. Once you become aware of the ground beneath you in dreams, the rest is simply sleight of hand. We try to shift ourselves wide enough to take more than we ever thought possible but it’s hard when you’re certain there’s a message tucked behind the eyelids of everything, and you’d swear on your headstone that the rain smells of swollen lips and secrets you thought were buried inside someone else. Seven minutes in heaven, spin the bottle, the time you skinned your knees on ice, slammed back to life by the sting. Your first kiss stabs me in the back, spills blood across the time before all the times you can’t stop sifting through now.

Be patient with me, angel, even in expert hands like yours this doesn’t get any easier. Winter seems to follow winter, all the seasons of dying and frost take place at once like a crystalline nest of frozen trees that crush your tender throat. Time is a gift and a thief and a scream and I promise to collapse the minute you leave. You wrap my hair in braids tight around your strongest arm, the pain is just enough to catch my breath on a single hook. This bizarre strain of release, a decadent thorn. There will be rug burns and bathtubs but my mind is walking on the street counting black birds on a wire over the railroads tracks I was framing for photos; five, six, seven of them in a crooked row and one far off, alone. This doesn’t mean anything, of course, except that I am not in the world the way I’m supposed to be; I’m in the one I resurrected from cut-out dolls, cardboard panoramic scenes, living in the cream-colored curl of imaginary pages.

Pain comes to me daily but I trust it, I let it lead if it wants to, it teaches me not to hide as much. The way you slide into me is a forked tongue, one side torture, the other ecstasy; I have to take them both or deprivation. As night takes over the moon, the salt in my veins sparks and flashes all around us like colors from the dark side of rainbows. You need not cry for this strange love, I like to watch the pieces of me fall, it’s the only way they catch the light. I’m stronger now. And even though generations of misguided wars rupture themselves through me before you can even say my name, it’s beautiful madness to hear you try.

You reach for me but I am a void, I am a hellish collision of dying worlds inside. These cruel words hang me on the wall and leave me there, exposed, afraid, unraveling, alone. And I’ve been writing, baby love, writing, writing, awful, awful, terrible writing, it ought to be a crime these unforgivable lines slashed in defiance against borrowed time, wretched incoherent manic overflow like bleeding an animal of poison, I’ve written one hundred journals in a mouthful of days, page after page, one more useless than the one before, stacking them, digging them, dragging them through the mud and the rage with me. Please don’t touch me anywhere, I am fever. My eyes finally adjusted to the darkness of this strange religion, where wings are clipped and spread at will.

Still as a cradle robbed of death, but for the smooth motion of the weapon in my hand, and the raking in my brain, and the slamming in my chest to the beat of city after city dropping to their weakened knees, I’ve kept on like the possessed searching for something. Moon rise, moon set, I have not aged since birth and I have never been so sure I’ve died too many times, I am only a pale reflection of myself, the blue fade of a forgotten lust for beautiful sins. The days have been rusted white cages, feathered ink, lace candy legs, something is dark and tethered inside me, darting its many faces in and out of the brush. Something nameless in me that I can’t seem to clutch, needs a love beyond anything the world can produce; a flower opens itself to an empty room.

And I am trying and I am failing, and this thing, this need that swallows itself into me – it is still waiting. All the world is wasted panting breath and me on the wall, and these words like ears on such abysmal pages, we are all waiting.